The Feast of Pentecost (WhitSunday) – May 24, 2026:  

Today’s Preacher is the Rev. Deacon Jackie McLeod:

Let us pray.

Blessed God, who gives us light in darkness!

Amen.

It’s Pentecost!!!

Also known as Whit Sunday,  Pentecost is a major Christian festival celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter.  It commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles and the birth of the Christian Church.  It is also the day the disciples became apostles. 

Disciple means “follower or learner,” and apostle means “messenger or missionary.”  These men now had the special assignment of spreading the Good News of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Held 50 days after Passover, Pentecost was also called the Festival of Harvest.  It was one of three major annual festivals of thanksgiving for the harvested crops.  Jesus was crucified at Passover time, and he ascended 40 days after his resurrection.  The Holy Spirit came 50 days after the Resurrection, 10 days after the Ascension. 

The scriptures says that Galileans, Parthians and Medes, and Elamites, and residents of Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia and more were together speaking their native language, and they understood one another.

In other words, a group of people who spoke different languages and came from different places and saw the world and their place in it differently all experienced a holy communion.  They spoke to one another, and they talked about “God’s deeds of power”.

When I think of the division in this world – 2026 – I pray that the day of Pentecost will come me to all people, starting with me.

Thus, as we hear in Peter’s speech (Act 2:14) was given to an international audience, and it resulted in a world-wide harvest of new believers – the first converts of Christianity.

A personal experience – recently I had the opportunity to read scholarship applications of high school students.  I was given renewed hope in the future when reading these applications.  Our young people are doing phenomenal things to ensure their future.  This experience remined me of an incident in 2018.

On Valentine’s Day 2018, 17people died tragically at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  The event grabbed headlines around the world: another senseless act of violence carried out in one of the places where kids should feel most protected and secure – in school.

But it was what came in the weeks and months after that Wednesday in February that made this tragedy different from all the others that had preceded.  A group of 28 students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas decided they had had enough.  They pooled their resources and used their voices to call on their peers to show up and to speak out against gun violence.  Five weeks later, almost half a million people – students, teachers, parents, and concerned citizens – answered the call of those 28 students and gathered in Washington D.C., for the first ever March for Our Lives.  It was reported that the D.C. march was one of 800 such events that took place that day in the United States.

This might seem an unusual story to include in a Pentecost sermon, but my imagination tells me there is a similarity here that should be considered: What if the work of those 28 students in 2018 was more than just a righteous reaction?  What if it was the work of the Holy Spirit, moving in the hearts and minds of young and old alike?

This is after all, where Peter begins his Pentecost sermon:  “In the last days, God declares, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy.”  These words, spoken just 50 days after the tragedy of Good Friday and the bewilderment of Easter Sunday, changed the tone for the earliest followers of the Jesus Movement.  For weeks, they had been waiting and praying, perhaps somewhat nervously, wondering what might come next.

Just as we wait today for what is to come next!

 And it was into this uncertain and chaotic situation that the Spirit brought new hope, a new life for all followers of Jesus.

 What happens next seems surprising, almost unbelievable, but it shouldn’t be.  This has been the Spirit’s work since the very beginning.  At the beginning of creation, over the waters of the deep – – spirit was there, hovering, waiting, participating in new life against a backdrop of chaos and disorder.

During the time of the prophet Joel – the figure whom Peter used as an inspiration for his Pentecost sermon – the people looked in anticipation for the spirit’s arrival in their own moment of chaos and uncertainty.  In the days of Joel, drought, wildfires and swarms of locusts had led to severe famine across the land.  People were losing hope.  Despair and death were everywhere.  And in the midst of that tragedy, the prophet received a promise: The suffering will not last forever.  The rain would fall, the fields would again be green, the livestock would be healthy.  But the restoration Of Israel and Judah went well beyond streams and pastures: it included the heart also.  Because in those days, when everything was set right again, God’s Spirit would be poured out on everyone, young and old alike.

In our own chaotic and uncertain present, we are invited to consider the words of the prophet Joel, echoed centuries later by the apostle Paul, are reflected in the daily lives of young people. 

Results from the 2025 edition of the annual Harvard Youth poll show that young Americans have some serious concerns about the state of our country and our world.  Their concerns include the rash of political violence we face, the lack of civility and productivity within the public sphere, the decline in accessibility of health care, the rapid increase in overall cost of living – including their own grim prospects for future employment- and the impact of a world shaped by artificial intelligence.  They are aware of what is happening in our country and around the world.  And if 28 students from Parkland Florida can teach us anything about this generation it is this: Young people don’t linger with discontent.  Instead, they dream about the world as it could be, and then they show up to try to make that world a reality.

Can you, today imagine a world in which gun violence no longer exists? What about a future where poverty is history?  A future where everyone has enough to eat, access to clean water and adequate healthcare?  If you struggle to picture that kind of future, there is probably someone in your life right now who can imagine it. Go ask someone in their teens or twenties – and prepare to be surprised.  As I was surprised in reading the scholarship applications, I mentioned earlier.

This Pentecost, perhaps it is time for those of us with a little more experience to practice humility and listen attentively to both the concerns and the dreams of the young people among us.  Criticism comes easily to most of us, but when we rest in our criticism alone, we miss the creative capacity of the Spirit that is evident with the younger generation.  The audacity to move beyond criticism into a creative imagination of a hopeful future.  This is the life of the Spirit moving among us, doing what the Spirit has done since the beginning: calling forth new life out of chaos of the present.

Pentecost is more than a history of a long-ago miracle.  It is the source of hope and a map for all who follow Christ.

Each Sunday, we receive communion, but we are to be agents of spreading the Good News on Monday and every day.  Perhaps we can start by letting go of our labels of others and instead seek to see them as children of God.

Amen.

 

DAY OF PENTECOST MAY 24, 2026: WHIT SUNDAY!

Readings: Act 2: 1 –   21        Psalm 104:25 -35, 37

I Corinthians 12:3 – 13          John 20: 19 – 23